COVID misinformation in mainstream media, e.g., The NY Times ... #2

Last update: Thursday 9/19/22 

As the editor of this blog has suggested in previous notes, conservative media, e.g., Tucker Carlson's Fox News broadcasts, misinform by propounding blatant lies; whereas mainstream liberal/progressive media present the facts, but embed the facts in unfounded interpretations. 
The Your Coronavirus Tracker page of the NY Times has become a prominent dispenser of this kind of mainstream misinformation.

Information and misinformation in the mainstream

When the Times began to publish its Tracker page, the editor of this blog became an instant fan. He even added a section to his Omicron Defense page that strongly recommended that his readers consult the Tracker every day. 

• The Times' Tracker provided individual readers with vital information about a few of the cities, counties, and states that each reader really cared about: areas where they lived, where they worked, where they sought entertainment. Overall national data would also be provided if that's what a reader requested. Information that individual readers really wanted in a concise format was a welcome antithesis to the sprawling overload on the CDC's COVID Data Tracker page.

Unfortunately, as Delta gave way to Omicron, the Times did not evolve the content of its page. So the Tracker became one of Tucker Carlson's misinformation peers.

Here's a screen shot of the Sunday 9/25/22 edition that shows the Tracker's COVID data for New York City. Only part of the page is displayed in the short window, so the reader should scroll up and down to view the full contents of the page.

What's wrong with this page?

Most of the numbers that appear on the Tracker page are valid. Nevertheless, the following bullets identify significant ways in which the page misinforms its readers with regards to COVID cases, deaths, and vaccinations.

1. Gross undercounts of new COVID infections 
In early January 2022, Dr. Fauci suggested that new hospitalizations were better pandemic measures than new COVID infections.  

• "Omicron’s impact better measured by rising hospitalizations than cases, Fauci says", Bryan Pietsch and Jennifer Hassan, Washington Post, 1/3/21 

Nevertheless, the Times Tracker continued to report new infections and the percentage of tests that were positive instead of new hospitalizations, despite the fact that their estimates were based on official public health reports, reports that had to be gross undercounts of the true number of new infections in any community for at least two reasons

• Most people who experience new "COVID symptoms" will get tested, but Omicron has been so mild that many (most?) people who were infected under Omicron did not know that they had been infected, so they didn't get tested
  -- See "Awareness of SARS-CoV-2 Omicron Variant Infection Among Adults With Recent COVID-19 Seropositivity", Sandy Y. Joung, MHDS1; Joseph E. Ebinger, MD, MS1; Nancy Sun, MPS1; et al, JAMA, 8/17/22)
  
  
• Most of the people who did get tested used self-tests, but did not report positive results to the CDC or to any other any public health authority
  
  
• Self-tests sometimes yielded false negative results
  -- See "At-Home COVID-19 Antigen Tests -- Take Steps to Reduce Your Risk of False Negative", FDA, 8/11/22

In summary, the Times Tracker, like the CDC's Tracker, presents the best data available, but that data is incomplete; so the Times should have suspended publication until they devised algorithms for estimating plausible values from the incomplete data they derived from reports to public agencies. Otherwise the incomplete raw data provides their readers with gross underestimates of the persistence of the COVID pathogen in their communities.

2) Misleading counts of COVID deaths

So who got infected and who died from their COVID infections? The following headlines tell the tale, beginning with Dr. Fauci's prescient forecast in early January 2022:

• "Omicron will infect ‘just about everybody,’ Fauci says", Andrew Jeong and Ellen Francis, Washington Post, 1/12/22  
  
  
• "The Omicron wave accounts for many more U.S. deaths than Delta’s.", Maggie Astor, NY Times, 2/19/22
  
  
• "You Are Going to Get COVID Again … And Again … And Again", Katherine J. Wu, The Alantic, 5/27/22  
  
  
• "During the Omicron Wave, Death Rates Soared for Older People", Benjamin Mueller and Eleanor Lutz, NY Times, 5/31/22
  
  
• "Dr. Anthony Fauci Tests Positive for Coronavirus", Sheryl Gay Stolberg, NY Times, 6/15/22 
  
  
• "Covid’s risks are concentrated among Americans of Biden’s age.", Benjamin Mueller, NY Times, 7/21/22
  
  
• "Biden, 79, is experiencing fatigue, a runny nose and a dry cough after testing positive.", Michael D. Shear, NY Times, 7/21/22
  
  
• "Biden tests positive again for coronavirus after Paxlovid ‘rebound’", Yasmeen Abutaleb, Washington Post, 7/31/22

As Dr. Fauci had predicted, lots of people were infected by Omicron, including Dr. Fauci himself and President Biden, many more than once, e.g., President Biden  again. 

But the lion's share of those who died were 65 and over, suffering more than 75 percent of the deaths, the same age group that had suffered the lion's share of all COVID deaths under all previous variants. And as before, over 90 percent of Omicron deaths were suffered by persons 50 and older. 

Nevertheless, the Times' Tracker didn't report deaths by any age groups, thereby letting readers falsely infer that we are all more or less equally vulnerable to COVID; the youngest age groups who rarely died, even when they wren't vaccinated at all, were as vulnerable as the oldest groups for whom vaccines and boosters had saved the most lives. Nonsense.

3)  Misleading measures of vaccinations

The Times' Tracker includes two vaccine counts: Primary vaccination rates for "all ages"; and primary vaccination rates for residents 65 and older. Both are misleading indicators.

An "All ages" percentage is misleading because it includes the youngest age groups, 0 to 17 years old whose natural immunity is so strong that breakthrough deaths, i.e., deaths of unvaccinated youngsters, are rare events. What really matters is the vaccination and booster rates for the oldest age group, 50 and older because this age group accounts for 90 percent of COVID deaths. Indeed our vaccines and boosters are most effective, i.e., save the most lives, for those who are 65 and older.

Primary vaccination rates for the age 65 and older residents of a community were were appropriate contents for the Tracker prior to the recognition in the last few months of 2021 that the effectiveness of primary vaccinations fades over time, especially among the oldest residents of a community. Booster shots were recommended in the Fall of 2022; second boosters were recommended for those 50 and older in the Spring of 2022. 

• "C.D.C. Recommends Covid Booster Shots for Millions of Americans", Apoorva Mandavilli, NY Times, 10/22/21  
  
  
• "C.D.C. Urges Adults 50 and Older to Get Second Booster Shot", Sharon LaFraniere, NY Times, 5/20/22 

According to the CDC on 9/27/22, only 15,335,531 U.S. residents age 65+ had received second boosters. The U.S. Census says that total U.S. population for this age group is about 52,362,817. Therefore the percentage of age 65+ U.S. residents that is fully boosted is only 29 percent.

The Times' Tracker should have been modified to include the percentage of older residents who were up-to-date on their boosters. Primary vaccination rates by themselves are misleading.

P.S. 
On Wednesday 9/28/22, the editor of this blog encountered a very welcome surprise when reading the NY Times "The Morning" page. Its headline was "Who should get a Covid booster, and when? We answer the big questions." 

The answers provided for the "big questions" were the usual NY Times' mainstream dogma that misinterpreted the data in the two small tables included in the discussion. The welcome surprise was the tables. As the reader will see from the copies that follow, the data in the tables was exactly what the editor was suggesting should be in the Times tracker page in the preceding paragraphs of this blog note. Wow!!! 

The tables were described as "Chart shows the 30-day average from Aug. 22 to Sept. 21, 2022, in King County, Wash. | Source: Washington State Department of Health"

Unfortunately, the editor could not find the tables on the COVID dashboards of either Washington state or of Kings County. He apologizes to his readers for missing them if the tables were really there. But if they were not, then the Times must have copied the data from the sprawling CDC style pages on the COVID dashboards of the state or the county, then constructed the compact, highly informative tables that follow. If so, let us hope that these tables will become the prototype for a long overdue revision of the Times tracker ... :-)

P.P.S.

As of Wednesday 10/19/22 the Times Tracker was still providing the same misinformation.

__________________________________

Links to related notes on this blog:  

• "4 COVID FAQs", Last update: 9/11/22 
  
  
• "COVID misinformation in mainstream media's predictions that China's pivot from Zero COVID will fail ... #4", Last update: 12/17/22
• "COVID misinformation in mainstream media, e.g., Carlson (Fox News) vs. CDC (Washington Post) ... #3", Last update: 10/13/22
• "COVID misinformation ... #1", Last update: 8/4/22